So. As I drove my manual car (don’t worry about the brand or type, it’s not worth mentioning), I started wondering if the difference between driving a manual vs. an automatic was analogous to using a language with explicit memory management vs. a language with a garbage collection (GC) facility. Thing is, I love driving a manual, in spite of the Jakarta traffic – I love the control I get, the feeling of driving as art. But I would not use a non-GC language for most of the apps I write (web/enterprise); indeed for a very large class of apps, the convenience of GC far outweighs any non-determinism or performance losses.

So (that’s that word again). I have answered my own question, transmission types are not analogous to memory management mechanisms. Time to get back to my Sunday and do more pondering, or perhaps resume watching Heroes.